The collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been on the agenda for weeks. Every day, a new detail emerges about the operation of FTX and its affiliates.
There is another person whose name we hear very often in this process: Caroline Ellison. Ellison was the chief executive of the hedge fund Alameda Research, which Bankman-Fried founded and owned.
Last week, it was revealed that Bankman-Fried transferred about 10 billion dollars of the money deposited in Alameda to FTX, and as a result of the bankruptcy of the stock market, about 1.7 billion dollars of this money evaporated. “FTX lent the money to Alameda, and Alameda gambled with that money and lost,” Bankman-Fried said.
After Bankman-Fried’s accusation, the arrows turned to Ellison. The deletion of the young woman’s posts and contact information on social media also increased suspicions. Now journalists, investors and internet detectives are picking up every stone and looking for something about Ellison underneath. Finally, in a news report based on anonymous sources by CoinDesk, it was even more curious that Ellison and Bankman-Fried were dating for a while.
class=”medianet-inline-adv”>
The most important sources of information about Ellison, who is known to be 28 years old, are the Tumblr pages he has been sharing for years, the interviews he has given and the podcasts he has been a guest of. At first glance, Ellison, who appears to be an extremely intelligent and well-educated mathematical genius and bookworm, has surprising features when delved into the depths.
Here is the young woman everyone is wondering about…
* * * * *
Born on September 20, 1994, Caroline Ellison grew up in one of her suburbs outside of Boston.
Both her parents are economics professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His father, Glenn Ellison, is currently the department chair, and his mother, Sara Fisher Ellison, is among the school’s most senior professors. That’s why Ellison and his siblings often witnessed conversations about the economy in their childhood.
According to FTX’s 2020 podcast, Ellison learned how to read on his own at the age of 5 and managed to read the second book in the Harry Potter series, ‘The Chamber of Secrets’. According to a report in Forbes magazine, when he was only 8 years old, he wrote an economics article and presented it to his father. The article was about the price analysis of stuffed animals sold in a toy store.
class=”medianet-inline-adv”>
Ellison’s interest and ingenuity in mathematics emerged from childhood. Inspired by his daughters, father Glenn Ellison even wrote textbooks focused on advanced mathematics for children who were bored with basic math lessons.
Ellison’s interest and ingenuity in mathematics emerged from childhood. Inspired by his daughters, father Glenn Ellison even wrote textbooks focused on advanced mathematics for children who were bored with basic math lessons.
Ellison, who participated in competitions such as the Math Prize for Girls, known as the “biggest mathematics award for girls”, also studied mathematics at Stanford University, which she entered in 2012. Ruth Ackerman, one of the professors who attended his classes, described Ellison to Forbes magazine as “intelligent, focused, and math-minded.” Ellison’s interest in the philosophy of “effective philanthropy” also began in college. She was even among the members of the school’s Influential Philanthropy Club.
Ellison, who started working on Wall Street after graduating from Stanford University in 2016, never dreamed of such a job throughout his life or said “I can’t live if I don’t work in the finance industry”. Rather, he said, “What do mathematics graduates do?” The data from his research led Ellison to this work.
class=”medianet-inline-adv”>
MEET BANKMAN-FRIED AT JANE STREET
Working at Jane Street Capital, one of Wall Street’s leading trading companies, in his first job, Ellison met Bankman-Fried here. Both were in their 20s, both parents were professors, and both were very interested in the philosophy of “effective philanthropy,” which we can summarize as making a lot of money to donate to charities. He picked up the frequencies immediately.
So when Bankman-Fried left Jane Street in 2018 to found Alameda, it came as no surprise that he convinced Ellison to follow suit.
In Ellison’s words on FTX’s podcast, the founding of Alameda was a “studded omen…” situation.
class=”medianet-inline-adv”>
“I had just graduated from college and I was one of Alameda’s most experienced brokers,” Ellison said of the early days of the company, summing up his arrival in such an important position at such a young age, with the words “it was almost accidental.” “We were like, ‘Well, yeah, we don’t quite know what we’re doing,'” Ellison told Forbes.
When Ellison started working at Alameda, he was baffled by the pace of business. Next to Alameda, even Jane Street was slow. “The way it did business was: Someone proposes something, someone else writes and publishes the code for that proposal. It was all over in an hour,” he said on the FTX podcast.
class=”medianet-inline-adv”>
According to various sources speaking to The Wall Street Journal, one of the factors underlying this rapidity in SBF’s immediate environment was the use of stimulant drugs. In fact, Ellison used expressions praising these drugs in a tweet last year.
WATCHING THE ROYAL WEDDING WHILE OTHERS PLAYED
Ellison was the only woman on the Alameda Research team. Other employees of the company were Gary Wang, Nishad Singh and Sam Trabucco, close friends of Bankman-Fried.
In 2018, they moved the company together from Berkeley to Hong Kong. Here, they lived together in a student-like environment and traded crypto. While the men of the team spent their time playing video games outside of work, Ellison filled time watching things like the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
To tell the truth, everything in the Bankman-Fried universe was moving at a dizzying pace. Founded a year after Alameda, FTX has grown into one of the largest crypto markets in the world within a few years. For a while, Bankman-Fried was CEO of both companies simultaneously.
Alameda and FTX had offices and employees in both Hong Kong and the Bahamas. Like Bankman-Fried, Ellison spent most of his time in the Bahamas.
At the beginning of Alameda’s trading strategies was arbitrage, which we can define as buying a valuable asset cheap in one market and selling it high in another market. Since FTX was among the favorite markets of both large and small investors at that time, Alameda handled most of its transactions on FTX.
SBF LEASES CEO TO HIM AND TRABUCCO
Alameda started investing in cryptocurrencies in 2020 that yielded interest-like gains. “I was concerned about the risks, but I lost the argument,” Ellison said in a podcast released in early 2021, stating that he initially opposed the idea.
As Trabucco stated in his 2021 tweets, Alameda’s aggressive strategies became determined over time by its internal strength and factors such as Elon Musk’s social media posts.
As cryptocurrencies broke records in the fall of 2021, FTX was experiencing its heyday, celebrating the naming rights of the University of California’s football field. Desiring to focus on FTX during this period, Bankman-Fried relinquished management of Alameda to Ellison and Trabucco as co-CEOs. Alameda’s team at that time was 25 people.
Sam Bankman-Fried is no longer CEO, but still owns Alameda. According to FTX’s bankruptcy filing, Gary Wang owned 90 percent of the company and SBF 10 percent.
The duo was named to Forbes magazine’s “30 Successful Under 30 Names” list in 2022.
While many markets went bankrupt during the free fall of cryptocurrencies in early 2022, Bankman-Fried took on the role of savior; In order to reduce the tension of the market, it gave loans to companies in a difficult situation and bought those on the verge of bankruptcy.
However, Alameda was not in good shape in those days either. The company received frequent margin calls. Trabucco’s resignation as co-CEO in August was also an important indicator. Trabucco also stated that working at Alameda was “difficult, tiring and consuming”.
Prior to the collapse of FTX, Bankman-Fried spent most of his time in the spotlight, doing TV crypto commentary, and lobbying lawmakers in Washington. Ellison was always behind the scenes during this process, working in the “engine room” of Alameda. He was quite happy with the position, FTX employees told Forbes. Almost entirely owned by Bankman-Fried, Alameda had only one goal: to make money. And the SBF had entrusted this important task to Ellison.
SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS RELEASED ALL THE FOOY
After that point, Ellison remained the sole manager, but remained unobtrusive. Today, everyone from Twitter accounts like @Autismcapital to broadcasters like Gawker is researching Ellison. Many details were revealed in this process.
It was known that Ellison was a very active user on social media until recently. He often tweeted under the username @carolinecapital, sharing on two Tumblr accounts named “worldoptimization” and “worldoptimization-lifeadvice”, Gawker reported.
One of the details that emerged about Ellison is that he is a good reader. Ellison, who is a frequent book reviewer on Tumblr, seems to have commented most recently on Naomi Novik’s “The Golden Enclaves” and Ned Beuman’s “Venomous Lumpsucker.” However, he is also known to read everything from Harry Potter books to the economics-politics blog Substack by Matthew Yglesias.
Last week, CoinDesk, citing unnamed sources, wrote in a report that Ellison is a member of a group of 10 FTX/Alameda employees living together in the Bahamas. According to the site, there were also occasional romantic relationships between these 10 people. There was such a relationship between Ellison and Bankman-Fried. The couple broke up and reconciled from time to time.
Ellison, whose favorite color is gray, described her romantic relationship as “traditional” in terms of gender norms in her earlier Tumblr posts. In the following period, the young woman wrote articles stating that she moved away from the traditional and became “skeptical about culture/society”.
According to a post on Tumblr, life at home in the Bahamas was like the “harem of the Chinese emperor.” There was a hierarchy in the house and everyone knew their role in that hierarchy. Ellison and his housemates’ therapists were also partners. It was written in the now-deleted SBF profile of Sequoia Capital that this person was George Lerner.
The next step of Ellison, who was fired from Alameda in the past days, is not clear. The whereabouts of Ellison, whose online posts, including his LinkedIn page, have gradually disappeared, are also unknown. After the tweet defending Alameda’s balance sheet on November 6, he was never heard from again.
In early November, Ellison held a video conference with Alameda employees. He said that FTX transferred money from its customers to Alameda so that it could pay off its debts. Moreover, Bankman-Fried, Singh and Wang were aware of this decision. While Ellison apologized for disappointing the team, many Alameda employees resigned the next day. Bankruptcy announcements followed shortly thereafter.
Tags: Caroline Ellison behindthescenes lover bankrupt Crypto King ..
-
